Brief by Central Staff
Recreation – February 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
If you want to minimize wear and tear on the landscape, this is probably the best time of year for climbing 14ers. Most of us, however, visit the highest peaks in more clement seasons, and if you’re planning to climb Mt. Tabeguache someday, you may want to consider a different route.
Tabeguache, at 14,155 feet, sits near another big peak, 14,229-foot Mt. Shavano, home of the famous “Angel of Shavano” (although our publisher thinks it looks more like Woody Woodpecker). The summits are less than a mile apart, with a dip of 435 feet between them. Thus they’re often climbed together; the most popular route is from Blank’s Cabin on the east side, which ascends Shavano first.
However, Tabeguache, the 26th-highest in Colorado, did have its own route — up Jennings Creek from the road up the North Fork of the South Arkansas River (our pioneers were not all that creative with place names, at least in this area).
That route, however, had some problems, and now the U.S. Forest Service and the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative are asking climbers to take another course — like the Blank’s Cabin route.
The main problem with the Jennings Creek trail was erosion. According to CFI’s newsletter issued in the fall of 2003, “the trampling of fragile vegetation around the trail, combined with the wearing away of the earth by traction-seeking rubber soles, is enabling periodic water flows to carry much of the resident soil away. This erosive process increases sedimentation in waterways, damages plant and wildlife habitat, and makes climbing eroded trails difficult or even dangerous for people.”
To slow the erosion, CFI volunteers worked on the Jennings Creek trail in the summer of 2002:
“CFI stabilized the soils in these areas and planted native species in sections where plants had succumbed to trampling. Where the water had run its swiftest course down the trail, moving dirt and carving deep gullies out of the land, CFI installed 339 log check dams and 237 log terraces. The square, two-foot tall terraces were installed in the hillside, putting them in position to capture any dirt making its way downhill.
“The captured dirt will slowly fill in the gullies, and the seeds it carries to its new resting place will provide growth along the formerly barren path. In other areas, willow waffles (three-foot-long bunches of live willow branches tightly woven together) were partially buried in the soil. These natural barriers work to slow the water’s flow, and will capture other plants’ seeds as they slowly grow into new willow shrubs.”
To give all that a chance to work, the Forest Service has asked climbers not to use Jennings Creek, and CFI has taken Jennings off its list of recommended routes.
There is another gulch on the North Fork side: McCoy Creek. On account of some narrow and steep places, it’s an almost impassable route up. It can be a deadly trap on the way down. In years past, people who went up Jennings could lose their bearings and start down McCoy, where they’d find themselves unable to continue down, and without enough daylight or energy to climb up and over to Jennings. Over the years, this has caused several deaths.
So, if you want to climb Tabeguache, do it from the Blank’s Cabin side (or perhaps Squaw Creek if you’re ambitious). And if you’re up the North Fork, there are several pleasant hikes (like Cyclone Pass from the ghost town of Shavano, or the trails around North Fork Reservoir) which shouldn’t endanger you or the vegetation.
Tabeguache is one of only four 14ers in Colorado with a Ute name — the others are Shavano, Antero, and Uncompahgre. Its name comes from a band of Utes who had a chief named Shavano, and like the Ute word Saguache, its pronunciation bears little resemblance to its spelling: TAB-uh-wash is a good start.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the full Ute name of the Tabeguache band was Mog wat avung want singwu, which means “cedar-bark sun-slope people.”
